Chapter 7 #2
‘But we have to do something,’ I put in.
‘What’s the alternative – we all just sit here?
Forever? Waiting for people in the twenty-first century to rope themselves together and come in after us?
’ It was clearly a fear that they all had, because the entire group went quiet.
I saw Kaylinn’s lip start to wobble. ‘Look,’ I went on in a slightly softer tone, ‘I’m sorry.
But we can’t do nothing. We can’t just exist here in some weird kind of stasis.
We either have to work at getting ourselves home or make ourselves new lives here. ’
I marched away from the group with my back straight, not quite sure where I was heading, but cursing myself under my breath.
Talking the talk was one thing but I wasn’t entirely sure about how to go about walking the walk.
Their inertia, however, was grating on my nerves.
Shock and fear were all very well, but they couldn’t rule us forever.
Lachlan caught up with me. ‘You can be scary when you want to be, can’t you?’ he observed.
‘I’m a teacher. They drum it into you during the PGCE.’ I still had a bubble of anger pushing at my stomach. ‘Lesson planning, educational theory and how to put the fear of God into people.’
A hairy cow being driven by a young boy with a stick gave me a lowered head and tilted horn of threat, but as the cow was small enough for me to have pushed it over had it been able to touch me, I ignored it.
‘Well, it was impressive,’ Lachlan said at last.
‘I’m used to dealing with groups in a state of panic,’ I said. ‘Well, school trips anyway. Sometimes you have to act as though you have a handle on what’s going on just to keep things calm.’
Another pause. Over at the stables, Fergus was reshoeing a horse. The tap-tap of the nails in the hoof took me right back to pony-owning teenagehood. ‘They’re scared,’ Lachlan said, not looking at me. ‘We’re all scared. It makes us – we’re not behaving normally.’
‘While I am completely fine with what’s going on and am thoroughly enjoying living through a textbook illustration of “life in a castle”,’ I said. ‘Everyone is scared. But sitting back and doing nothing, waiting for rescue – it’s just so passive.’
Lachlan smiled, but not at me. It was a grim sort of smile. ‘Sometimes keeping everything on an even keel is good enough, you know,’ he said.
I didn’t reply. We had reached the end of the caravan of moving people and arrived at a small archway over a gap in the headland wall where the ground sloped down.
Beyond the archway the road seemed to have been carved into the rock like a tunnel, and my cautious exploratory sidle into this revealed that the track emerged onto a precipitous way down the cliffside and could be locked by a huge iron gate, which was currently hanging open.
The path was slippery with dung and vertiginous and I began to doubt my own idea.
‘Maybe we should…’ I hesitated but Lachlan grabbed my arm and pulled me through the gate and out onto the cliff. Far, far below us the sea moved like a beast just waiting for prey to drop into its mouth.
‘Come on. Like I said, I don’t think we can die.’ He transferred his grasp to my hand and held it as we inched our way along the edge of the track, trying to avoid the larger dung piles and the slippery trampled middle.
‘I cannot stress how much I don’t want to test your theory.
’ I kept my back firmly against the side of the track that sloped up towards the walled-in headland because the other side was too terrifying.
There were seagulls flying below us. Although the track was wide enough to accommodate a wagon and the beasts pulling it, the drop from the edge was vertigo-inducing and the sea at the bottom looked deep and sinister.
‘Ah, come on, now. We’re going to go skinny dipping, surely that’s worth looking forward to?’ He wiggled his eyebrows.
I, who had been going to wade into the water fully dressed, resolved not even to take my coat off and was working on where to put my face if he stripped naked, when Lachlan stopped suddenly. ‘Oh.’
He’d jerked my arm, his halt had been so abrupt. ‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. Here, you try.’ A tug on my hand brought me up alongside him, both of us balanced on the path like two people sharing a tightrope.
I tried to take a step further forward – and couldn’t.
It felt as though the air had become too thick.
Nothing solid prevented us going on, but it felt like trying to walk against the pressure of an inflated balloon.
‘But that’s…’ I started, having no end to the sentence in mind. The inability to walk on was impossible, stupid, ridiculous. And yet, there it was.
‘I’ll try going round. Hang on to me,’ Lachlan said and then, alarmingly, stepped off the path.
I grasped his jumper and held on as it stretched and he hung out over the drop, pushing at the air.
A gull flew right through him and circled above his head for a moment, giving us both a beady-eyed look of assessment.
‘Nope. It seems to go all the way out.’ Lachlan got hold of me to pull himself back and I reeled in the acres of deformed wool that flopped in an elephantine way around him with a sense of weak-kneed relief.
‘So, we can’t go down here?’ I wanted to hug him for not falling over the cliff. ‘Why not? It’s… stupid,’ I finished in a worrying lack of available vocabulary.
‘Doesn’t look that way, nope.’
We looked at one another again. I was keeping my eyes on him to prevent me from thinking about the horrible drop.
In the end I couldn’t help myself and looked down at the hundred feet of sheer cliff between us and the sea and inched my way back up the path again, keeping my hold on his jumper, just in case he was wrong about the whole ‘not being able to die’ thing.
Once we’d reached solid, wide ground back through the gate, we had to jostle our way through an unruly flock of geese, who hissed and stretched their necks at us in a most unfriendly fashion. I relaxed and tried not to give in to the urge to throw myself flat on my face and kiss the grass.
‘What the hell was it?’ I asked as soon as I got control over my vocal cords again and could be confident that I could speak rather than squeak.
‘A barrier of some kind.’ Lachlan threaded his way through the geese and found us a quiet spot behind one of the little dwellings, where the garden was now full of dumped wooden crates.
Three women, two young and one grey-haired and wrinkled with age, wound around with huge blanket-type shawls fastened with pins and tucked into belts over linen shifts came barefoot across the ground, chatting incomprehensibly among themselves.
‘Yes, Lachlan, I’d worked that much out for myself,’ I said, snippy with uncertainty, and sat down, thoughtlessly pulling at a crate to see what was inside.
One of the women gave a sharp intake of breath, crossed herself and nudged the others.
They all stared at the crate and I held my hands up so I wasn’t tempted to touch anything else that might be visible.
‘Rats,’ one of the women said, and the others all nodded and went back to their discussion as they began pulling up some green stalks that I was very afraid might be kale. Turnips were bad enough, I really didn’t want to have to eat kale as well.
Lachlan slumped down alongside me. ‘Shit,’ he said.
The fear needled at me again and I looked at him. His mouth was twisted and he was looking at his knees. ‘It’s something, anyway,’ I said.
‘Something, nothing, I don’t know. Do you know how stupid this all makes me feel? How utterly fucking useless?’
His voice held such a note of hopelessness that I patted his shoulder.
It was so tense that I was surprised that my pat didn’t knock him over.
‘You’re no more useless than the rest of us, though,’ I said sympathetically because he really did look abject with his knees drawn up and his hands around the back of his neck, pulling his head down.
‘I’m a history lecturer. Getting stuck in the past is the sort of thing I ought to dream about, instead it’s like some kind of Groundhog Day, only with added mud.
I should be useful.’ He looked at me sideways.
‘Sorry, Pax. Like I said, we’re all scared and processing.
I just keep thinking – I’ve done my time circling the drain.
Things were on the up, I thought. New starts, new house, and then – yeah, well.
I’m not in such great shape. And now—’ he threw his hands out to indicate walls and baskets and boxes ‘—this.’
I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant when we were interrupted by Mal.
‘There you are!’ He marched up to us, walking around the group of women and literally through one of them. She shivered and pulled her blanket closer around her, gathering it under her chin.
‘It looks like we can’t leave,’ Lachlan said baldly. ‘There’s some kind of barrier.’
I glanced at him quickly and he gave me a look that said, very clearly, ‘What I said just now was between us.’ It had an edge of desperation to it. Great. I’m not only trapped in the past, I’m trapped there with a depressed history lecturer. This gets better and better.
‘Very Timestorms. So, Kay has been into the kitchens – they’re firing up the ovens and baking bread now like there’s no tomorrow, which there very well might not be, who can say?’
‘Where’s Davey?’ Lachlan asked.
‘He’s checking out the men. Typical. He says he’s getting an in-depth look at eighteenth-century clothing types but if you believe that you’ll believe anything. I thought he was all about the Picts, now it turns out he’s history-curious.’ Mal curled his lip.